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Katherine Welch doesn’t expect campaign contributions from her famous father

State Senate candidate Katherine Welch, and

her father, former GE chairman Jack Welch.

STATE SENATE | 9TH DISTRICT | Katherine Welch has a famous and wealthy father, but don’t expect him to write a check to his daughter’s upstart state Senate campaign in the East Bay.

Jack Welch, one of America’s most successful corporate titans, as chairman of General Electric for 20 years, once earned $76 million in a single year, but, for now, his daughter doesn’t expect any campaign contributions in her June primary race against fellow Democrats Nancy Skinner and Sandre Swanson.

“I’ll be honest with you. I love my dad and he loves me, and our politics couldn’t be any different,” Welch said this week. “So he has not donated, nor has any of his friends, nor do I expect they will.”

Instead, he’s supporting her emotionally. “He supports me as a dad,” says Welch, a first-time candidate for public office. “He knows I’ve been doing this stuff. He’s been watching me for five years.” Before entering the race, Welch was an statewide advocate for school children with the grassroots Educate Our State.

Welch says her parents and her own children were skeptical of her advocacy over the years. “What are you doing?” she says her kids would ask. “No one understands it when you’re going up to [Sacramento] as an advocate. But this–everybody understands,” Welch says of her candidacy for the district that includes Oakland, Berkeley, Richmond, Alameda and San Leandro.

In a 2001 profile on her father in People, Jack Welch admitted he could have been a better father. “I was too much on the critical side, on ‘Let’s get A’s’ and not enough on the cheerleading side,” he said. Katherine is the oldest of four.

Katherine Welch actually followed her father into the business world. After once interning for former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley’s office she worked in finance for Goldman Sachs. Later, she moved to San Francisco and then across the bay to Piedmont six years ago.

Despite her father not opening his checkbook, Welch has performed well on her own as a political fundraiser. Her campaign raised more than $104,000 during the last three months of last year. In contrast, Swanson, a far more well-known political entity, received just $87,000 during the last six months of 2015. Both trail Skinner who raised $277,000 and sits on nearly $1.1 million in reserves.

4Comments

If Katherine Welch and her father Jack Welch both really wanted to make a major difference in regard to improving American society, she should forget about running for office in the Bay area, and instead she should start publishing a newspaper that would discuss some of the items, and including in regard to the extremely bigtime corruption, that the mainstream media refuses to discuss, AND OFTEN EVEN PRETENDS DOES NOT EXIST.

More specifically, Katherine could be the publisher and her father could provide the financing for such a newspaper.

While the typical newspaper cannot be too hardhitting, and including since it normally is so extremely dependent on advertising revenue (for instance the money you pay to get the SF Chronicle or Oakland Tribune covers only a small fraction of the paper's total expenses, AND MOST OF THE PAPER's INCOME IS WHAT IT COLLECTS FROM ADVERTISERS), however Jack Welch could provide enough money to make a newspaper truly independent, and then it would not have to kiss anybody's behind.

Most of the highest ranking members of both the Democratic and Republican parties are sleazeballs, scumbags, weasels, parasites, con men, scam artists, professional pathological liars, and blood sucking leeches.

While I do trust the Republicans to be a little more interested in doing what is best for the country than I do the Democrats, however the top leadership of both major political parties is extremely sleazy.

However the thing that always surprises me far and away the most is that the overwhelming majority of high ranking politicians, and no matter how extremely sleazy they are and no matter how totally determined they are to grab AND STEAL as much money as possible, never think that the country they are ruining and selling downriver is the one that their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren will have to live in.

For instance somewhat related to the above as far as the “standards” of a lot of the big boys, some of the children and grandchildren of the very highest ranking tobacco company executives have died of lung cancer from cigarette smoking, in other words as a result of the culture and environment caused by those sleazy tobacco company executives who have pretended that the tobacco companies are not co-conspirators in causing slow mass murder.

And two of the very sleaziest major landlords in Bay area history, and both of whom would engage in absolutely any criminal activity, and including arranging multi million dollar arson fires, so as to increase profits, had their own children die very prematurely, and perhaps as a result of the many asbestos violations the buildings they owned were full of.

So we don't need a Democratic Party and we don't need a Republican Party, what we need is a DO WHAT IS BEST FOR YOUR CHILDREN, GRANCHILDREMN, AND FUTURE GREAT GRANDCHILDREN POLITICAL PARTY.

And two of the very sleaziest major landlords in Bay area history, and both of whom would engage in absolutely any criminal activity, and including arranging multi million dollar arson fires, so as to increase profits, had their own children die very prematurely, and perhaps as a result of the many asbestos violations the buildings they owned were full of.